People here try to balance all the ships agaisnt each other. You all want your cargo ships to pack a ton of heat, and your fighters to have armor, and your bombers to be uber fast. This is wrong.

HEre is how i see it:

A fighter is just that. It is ment to be very fast, carry a few guns, and blow hte crap out of stuff.

A cargo ship is ment to be heavily armored. As is it takes A LOT to take 1 down. and slow. and with lots of cargo. But not a lot of guns.

A bomber is ment to fly and drop really big things that go BOOM. It should have armor, but not too much. It should have some guns, but not too many. And most of all, it should not be incredably manuverable. but it carries things that put a beat down on stuff.



What i'm trying to say is, ships shouldn't be balanced against ships of other classes too much. A bomber shouldn't be able to hold it's own against fighters, a cargo ship shouldn't be able to hold its own against a fighter, but a fighter shouldn't stand a chance alone against a capital ship, a fighter shouldn't be able to make millions trading, ect.

Amen. Just give the promy anothe L port. :)

Agreed.

Urza I agree with you except:
A trader is a fast ship with light armor/weapons that tries to avoid fighting.... is my idea of a trader...

/me agrees with roguelazer

"A trader is a fast ship with light armor/weapons that tries to avoid fighting.... is my idea of a trader."

That's my idea of a courier (or scout for that matter). Couriers have less cargo than traders. The problem with the Maud is that it is a courier with more cargo than traders, which kinda defeats the point of having a trader.

While I agree with you in theory, the fact is there's nothing for the bombers to bomb at the moment so their function is a little bit pointless.

And the centurion is rendered pointless by the valk and the vult, it's simply not fast enough. Personally I think the valk and cent should switch manuvourability/acceleration because the cent has a low hull it should be harder to hit.

A) The frigate is there to bomb if you can get it before the escorts do
B) The centurion is more maneuverable than the valk, and will be much more so in the future. The vult is a different beast entirely

Celebrim, I guess I would call slow, hvy armor tons of cargo, little weaponry a frieghter. The marauder a trader, and I would consider the centurion a good courier ship (since courier's have the min needed cargo space in exchange for speed).

What things are called aside I don't think we have any of the "lots of cargo/armor" trade ships. IMO they should have a min of 50 cargo slots.
We have one "faster, cargo carrying, less weapons/armor than equivelent speed ships," namely the maurader (though it's a little weird cause it's a special).

So I think the atlas and centaur should be change to fall into the above discriptions, instead of just being under gunned bombers, with extra cargo.

One problem with the cent. is that there is no one good small weapon that can take stuff down. The cent needs to be agile and fast with one small port. If there was something like a Blue ion, similar to what the bots have, they might be a lot more useful.

The tach's pretty damn good in a cent (and will become even better if the cent is faster). It does 4000 damage per second, and if you're in a highly manueverable ship like the cent you can keep a stream of shots on your target (assuming it's not a cent as well).

Yep I have to agree the cent is a nice little ship - specially with the tach - I have beaten proms/valk/vults in a cent.

The centurion takes 4.01 seconds to go from 0 to 65 the valk takes 3.18 seconds and it spins around faster aswell.

Bombing the capital ship doesn't accomplish anything so bombers are still of little use.

For the last time, the cent is going to be more maneuverable once they figure out how to make it so. a1k0n himself said so. And bombing the frigate is tons of money. I've got about 20 of the precious metals widgets hidden away, that's about 500,000c!

Maybe I'm just being stupid (not being programme code literate) but aren't maneuverability/acceleration just number values and easy to change?

And you said it IS more maneuverable than the valk when it's clearly not.

Hunter Alpha: The present physics model only works well for masses within a certain range. This hasn't been noticed alot because the ships historically all fell in that range, but as ships push the limits of that range (the Centurian) and beyond (the Frigate) there is increasing control problems like overdamping and so forth.

I'm not aware of the details either because the exact algorithms haven't been released (and probably won't be).

Obviously the algoritms are going to need to be reworked and by all appearances the devs are aware of the problem and the need to address it.

hunter, the maneuverability/acceleration thing is determined by a the mass of the ship combined with the nifty physics thing, the problem with making the cent more maneuverable is that if you decrease the mass any more it'll start rotating uncontrollably thus making it uncontrollable.

Wow, thats complicated but how do engines fit in this jigsaw puzzle?

Well, at its heart the algorithm is basically: Acceleration = Force/Mass

Ships have mass. Engines provide the thrust. The resulting number determines the manueverability of the ship.

But there are lots of complications. Ships don't accelerate smoothly. They follow a relativistic curve - it gets harder and harder to accelerate the faster you go. Vectors are generally conserved, but ships also have a maximum speed, so when switching directions (e.g. a strafe) there is a (non-constant?) bleed so that the fastest speed you can travel is constant regardless of the direction of travel (no bleed means that you could exceed your maximum speed by going in some arbitrary diagonal).

And that's just the parts I'm pretty clear on. I'm not completely clear on the wierd things that go on with rotational inertia, which is the heart of the problem with very low and very high mass ships AFAIK.

My advice, Give the prom 25,000 hp, get rid of the 2 small ports and add another large port. Increase the valk hull to 15,000 maybe remove 1 small port if its really necisary. Increase the cargo hold of the maurader to 30. Decrease the manuever by 1 and get rid of 2 small ports.

Only get rid of 1small port on the maud, set the Prom's hull to 24000 and the valk's to 14000. Otherwise, good!